


Ten Things Spike Carried With Him

by Hello_Spikey



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-19
Updated: 2010-03-19
Packaged: 2019-10-29 13:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17809205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hello_Spikey/pseuds/Hello_Spikey
Summary: A short ficlet on the theme "Ten things that survived the hellmouth collapse"





	Ten Things Spike Carried With Him

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Maudlin

Spike carries Faith with him in the four cigarettes, left from the pack he bummed from her that last day. He keeps them tucked in the cellophane wrapper of a new pack of Marlboro's and doesn't smoke them. He doesn't know if she survived, but her cigarettes will.  
  
He carries Willow, and Tara too, in a little charm they'd given him before fighting some nasty the summer before. It was a one-use talisman, but he never threw it away, and now, with one witch gone and the other who knows where, he's glad he didn't. Besides, it's a bad-ass little stone dragon. He'd always planned on wearing it as jewelry afterward. He is waiting on finding a good chain.  
  
He carried Giles for just a week - a few mouthfuls of stolen whiskey in his silver flask. He toasted the old bastard, washing it down. He knew Giles survived, because of all people they'd left behind in the former town of Sunnyhell, that was the first name Angel mentioned in the present tense. Spike for some reason gloats over the fact that Angel doesn't know about the whiskey, that it's like a secret in his pocket, and then in his throat.  
  
There's a sharp nick in the flask, and Spike, fingering it, remembers the feel of it hitting his hip, through the lining of his coat as he took a hit from Caleb. The nick becomes a memento of Xander, then, and he wonders if he's still around to enjoy his one remaining eye. Funny how people who used to annoy you become fond friends in the haze of nostalgia.  
  
And on that thought, few creatures were as contemptible as Willy, but Spike still keeps the empty matchbook with "The Alibi Room" printed cheaply on it in orange ink.  
  
He thinks about Clem when he cleans out his pockets and finds a little tuft of gray kitten fur. He puts the tuft on top of the playstation with a Dorito in honor of simple friendship.  
  
He carries Anya in a bottle cap, not a memento from their drunken binge together, but from a bottle of Honey Gold hair dye that they'd shared, touching up roots together a week before the battle. Tucked into his pocket and forgotten, he can still smell the ammonia. "If I'm going to die," she said, "I'm going to die blonde." He'd told her she wasn't going to die.  
  
He doesn't feel worthy of carrying Joyce, but he can't put her down. She's in a photograph he stole, back when Buffy was gone. She has an arm around each girl, their heads all together, so alike in their grins. There's some stupid theme park behind them - bright and artificial. A corner is water-damaged and another is torn. He should put it in a frame, but he feels bereft without it in his pocket.  
  
For Dawn he has a string tied around his wrist. Part of a friendship bracelet torn apart in anger. It's dark blue and he looks at it, knowing she did survive. It reminds him, which is what tied strings are for.  
  
For Buffy he has nothing, but after a fight, with Angel or something else, he sometimes presses two fingers into the center of a bruise, and remembers her touch. And that reminds him that his flesh is another memento that survived the hellmouth collapse, improbably and amazingly.  
  
He falls asleep many nights, pressing his bruises.


End file.
